ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now time to take a look through the Sunday papers and I’m joined by the former Development Secretary, Clare Short, by the former British Ambassador to the United States, Christopher Meyer and by the former Cabinet Minister, David Mellor. We know what we are going to be discussing straight off, so much happening on this story, Syria. Clare, start us with Matthew D’Ancona in the Telegraph, “nauseating preening and a grubby carnival of inaction”. I take it you don’t agree.

CLARE SHORT: Absolutely not and the papers are full of this. Before they knew that America was going to follow Britain and allow its parliamentarians to have their say, they were denouncing Miliband or denouncing Cameron or denouncing the House of Commons. Look at this – supercilious – and I actually think, I mean Obama said it’s not time sensitive to respond, why don’t we discuss? It seems to me that flinging a few cruise missiles around doesn’t solve anything, taking a bit more time to say look at the whole situation in Syria and look for a solution is what we should do.

DM: But I think on that, Clare, that Obama says we’ve got time, we’ve got to look at the sequence of events, the reason why the rush – I mean Sir Christopher, we know why the rush was on, because the weekend before Obama had said we’re going to be bombing this weekend …

CLARE SHORT: Absolutely and he rang up Cameron and said …

DM: That’s now why he’s pausing, because of what happened in Westminster.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: Well what’s emerging I think very clearly I think from American sources in the last 24 hours is how much he was influenced by David Cameron’s defeat in the House of Commons and this gave him real pause. There is a very good story in the New York Times today, which we don’t have in front of us, in which he completely surprises his advisors by saying, hey, in the light of what happened in London, I think we ought to look at this again and go to Congress.

DM: So he took this decision off his own bat?

CLARE SHORT: Well he is the President!

DM: But he is surrounded by advisors.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: And the key thing is he is not only President, he is also Commander in Chief and he has to think like the Commander in Chief. There is one story that says, and this is very plausible I think, that he was thinking that maybe later on during his Presidency, he may have to do something similar with Iran so he’d better get this right and the best way of doing that is to consult Congress.

DM: Has he not ceded then, as Commander in Chief, the right to declare war?

SIR CHRISOPHER MEYER: A lot of Americans are saying this is not what a President should do because the War Files Resolution and all that is a subject of huge controversy but he’s done it, he’s done it.

DM: Okay, David Mellor, let’s get back to this article, there are parts of it …

DAVID MELLOR: But just on Obama, it will be the legacy of his presidency that he talks the talk but he doesn’t walk the walk and he should have got on with it.

CLARE SHORT: But if it stops America rushing to war all the time it might be a good thing for America.

DAVID MELLOR: I don’t agree with you and can I just state my position, having sat patiently here. What Matthew D’Ancona puts his finger on and he’s right is he says ‘self-evidently, Cameron’s political intelligence was faulty and the government’s whipping population lacked lustre.’ As a veteran of days under Mrs Thatcher when whips, I remember one whip who was 20 stone, David Lightbaum, pinning on Tory against a wall and the fellow started to cry, okay …

DM: Back in the old proper whipping days! Threaten them with violence.

CLARE SHORT: That’s what we want!

DAVID MELLOR: If you’re going to try to ask parliament to try to determine something, again it should be executive action, then you absolutely have to get the operation right. I think what Cameron did was he thought he was going to be backed by Miliband because you see the extraordinary thing was, was not that 30 Conservative members of parliament voted against the government but that 31 Conservative members of parliament including 10 government ministers, were allowed to absent themselves from the vote. They lost by 13. This is ineptitude and this is slightly I think one of the tragedies of David Cameron and D’Ancona also points this out, about the small coterie of people around him in Downing Street – his moral leadership was absolutely right but what he didn’t do, what he didn’t do, he was like a child in a firework factory with a box of matches, he didn’t get anything else right.

CLARE SHORT: For the first time in a long time I’m proud of the House of Commons for making America look again, it’s good for our democracy.

DAVID MELLOR: Parliamentary sophistry.

DM: Sir Christopher, we’ll continue to discuss this story but through the prism of the papers, and there is more on the special relationship, you’ve picked up the Mail and there is someone writing at the bottom of that page you might recognise.

SIR CHRISOPHER MEYER: There is this bloke Christopher Meyer writing at the bottom of the page for the Mail on Sunday and what is interesting – and I’m not mentioning this totally out of narcissism but because it just shows how the British papers were caught on the hop as we all were, seven o’clock, eight o’clock in the evening yesterday by this bombshell announcement by the President and the headline on my story turns out to be the opposite of what I was actually writing, namely ‘the proof that the special relationship is as strong as ever’. I believe in a strong relationship with the United States but to say it is a special relationship is an idealised sentimentalisation of a really strong pragmatic relationship and that was what I was writing about. I was saying that I didn’t think our relationship would be damaged one jot or tittle by the vote on Thursday.

DM: David, if you can just bring in the story you’ve picked out there which is the front of the Mail saying Obama, I’m going to copy Cameron. Let’s show that to people.

DAVID MELLOR: Yes, that is the Mail on Sunday doing their best for Dave to try and put a good gloss on what he achieved when it was really a cockup as indeed I suppose most things in history are, it was a cockup because he intended to do one thing but because his staff were poor and his preparation was poor, he didn’t. The fact that Obama has actually followed suit not only shows in my view a weakness in resolve on the part of Obama but also gives Cameron a chance to say that we still influence America. I believe that what Christopher says is absolutely right, that the special relationship had life blown back into it by Tony Blair and spin. Tony Blair thought that if he did everything that George W. Bush wanted him to do we had a special relationship with America, in the same way that Christopher Robin had a special relationship with Winnie the Pooh and dragged him up the stairs with his head bumping against every stair behind him.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: David, there is a but here and the but is it must have occurred to Obama at some point before the British vote that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to consult Congress. It must have been an idea that was out there but what gave it life and wind if you like was the fact that the British did it and …

DM: Let’s just focus now on Syria. Clare has got the story here, this underlies it all, “All right thinking people agree on this, Assad is a war criminal” but it is what to do about him.

CLARE SHORT: And it is a very, very brutal regime but the opposition now – it started off as a people’s movement, with all the different people in Syria asking for democracy but now it has got nasty Al Qaeda elements in it so we haven’t got any good guys, the people are suffering horrendously, it’s destabilising the region. I think pausing a little and saying just flinging in a few cruise missiles won’t solve anything, what should we do about the broader situation in Syria, can we get ceasefire, can we embarrass the Russians by saying your mate is using chemical weapons …

DM: On this issue of a peace conference which has been pushed around for months and months and months, does Assad need some wriggle room because the position certainly from our own government is ‘you must go’. That’s not really a precondition for negotiations.

CLARE SHORT: I know, that’s the problem isn’t it, because if we boxed ourselves in there and a lot of the people in the Christian community and the Alawites are sticking with Assad and of course a lot of people who supported the move to democracy are now saying this chaos is horrible, I’d rather have the regime.

DM: The problem is though, if we’ve designated him a war criminal we can’t really say we’ll let you stay in power.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: The trouble with designating him a war criminal and he deserves to be so designated, is it gives him no incentive to if you like leave office, surrender, whatever the term is because he knows he is going to end up in the Hague if he’s not careful but just to say I do think this G20 meeting is an opportunity particularly for the Americans and the Russians to try to get something moving.

DM: And I suppose part of the UK’s calculation is that if we were bombing the place we’d hardly be even speaking to each other.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: No, and Arab League foreign ministers are meeting today.

DAVID MELLOR: But the chances of Russia and America getting together under present leadership would seem to be slim and none and slim’s left town but the problem with Assad …

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: Never say never.

DAVID MELLOR: But the problem with Assad is his father Hafez Al Assad, who was a brute, and some of these artificial constructs in the Middle East which were drawn by European powers – they used to say in the Foreign Office that Iraq could only be run by a man with a big moustache, well the same is true of Syria. I’m not quite sure how far young Assad is actually in charge of that government but what is absolutely clear is the greatest inhibition to action in Syria by the west is our belief that it may very well be that those who are seeking to replace Assad are worse than him and that’s the worry.

DM: Indeed and that is the complexity of it all which the British public kind of reflected. I want to bring into this, that man you know all about and disagreed with, Clare, Tony Blair. Two interventions in the last seven days through the Times and the Sunday Times, unrepentant, saying he was shocked by the result in Parliament but that action needs to be taken against Syria.

DAVID MELLOR: Bless his heart, I think he sees himself as a great moral force for good and the tragedy for him is that he’s the only one in this country who does see him in that light. I think the fact of the matter is that David Cameron didn’t feel he could take action in Syria without the consent of Parliament is the legacy of Tony Blair, one of his greatest legacies is that the people in this country do not trust government when they talk about reasons why military action should be taken. I think a period of silence from Tony Blair would be very useful. We hear last week he was shuttling between oligarchs yachts in the South of France and my view is he should stick to doing that and keep out of it.

DM: Clare, what do you think about the politics of what happened last week in Parliament? Did Cameron offer Miliband a real chance to break with the Blair era here because Tony Blair wrote in the Times about intervention more or less the same as he’s sticking to it today in the Sunday Times, the shadow he throws over your party …

CLARE SHORT: Well Jack Straw who was the Foreign Secretary at the time saying in the Times that we’re all haunted by Iraq – that’s extraordinary. You’d think Blair would shut up and go away. The whole country is referring back and saying they didn’t give Blix long enough, now they are saying the inspectors can’t report. I think the corrective to some of the mistakes in Iraq with the country being more cautious and Obama being more cautious, again I like that but Blair, he’s unembarrasable.

DM: Okay, Blair, his conclusion differs from yours but he has said a lot of what you have said to me about the nature of the opposition in Syria, how difficult it is there with the moderate elements and the extremist elements, his analysis …

CLARE SHORT: But you know, now he says there’s a big chance for progress and peace. He’s lost the plot, he really has and he just writes articles at the drop of a hat saying whatever.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: I was going to say, there is another shadow which he casts over this debate because he so idealised the special relationship in his dealings with Bill Clinton and George W Bush that it has left the legacy of thinking that if we disagree with the Americans by one iota, the quote/unquote ‘special relationship’ is deeply bruised and damaged and maybe beyond repair. We’ve got to get out of this, it is not constant in the history of British and American relations since the Second World War.

DAVID MELLOR: And to that degree, by accident, Cameron may have blundered into a solution. He has suddenly made Obama, the most powerful man on earth, suddenly feel very lonely but no, I think the tragedy for Tony Blair is exactly what would happen in Syria should have been made clear to the Americans over Iraq. I had to travel to Iraq as Minister and met Saddam Hussein a number of occasions, he was an awful man but the truth was that Saddam Hussein ran a secular society and no one factored in that it would be easy to get rid of Saddam Hussein but not easy to control what happened thereafter and exactly the same is true of Syria.

DM: History repeating itself. Some other stories, we’ve got a couple of minutes for some other stories, Sir Christopher you’ve got the Queen’s old super-limo. Can we see the picture of that as well?

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: It’s next to a picture of David Beckham’s shrinking pouch as they say in the Sunday Mirror but we’re talking about the Queen though aren’t we. I think in this very serious discussion we need a few things to cheer us up and the fact that her old limo, her old Daimler Super V8 LWB has been sold for £40,000 with its central armrest with a sliding holder which was made for the royal handbag by Asprey House, security controls including blue flashing strobe lights, flashing headlamps and flashing rear lights, all of that I think the nation needs to know about.

DAVID MELLOR: Has your wife bought it, Christopher?

SIR CHRISTOPHER: No, she hasn’t but she’d love it.,

DM: Clare, we can have a last story from you, you’ve got the Observer, low wages, rising bills, why UKs recover lacks a feel good factor.

CLARE SHORT: The economy is recovering a bit but a massive chunk of the population is going to get no improvement whatsoever, Britain is becoming more unequal and divided. That’s going to change the nature of the country, this is a very serious one.

DM: Is this the ground that Ed Miliband is going to have to get back to? He’s going to have to make headway here if he is going to come across as a credible alternative.

CLARE SHORT: This is not correctible in the lifetime of one government, Britain has become much more unequal than it was in the 70s and we need a longer term strategy to reduce that. But Miliband should grab it, yes.

DAVID MELLOR: But the problem with …

DM: We’re out of time.

DAVID MELLOR: I was going to agree with that!

DM: Clare, David, thank you very much and to you, Sir Christopher. Sorry to cut you off at the knees.